Based upon the performance-installation-project 26 Letters to Deleuze which was presented at EMPAC/Troy, New York in spring 2014, this video essay is a condensed and reworked version of the video material presented on stage.

The crisis in Greece has proven it necessary to not only pose important questions of solidarity but also to practice new ways of learning how to live, think, and learn together. The recent European rhetorics of guilt and blame reflect this shortcoming of a common practice: in the end we all do sit in the same boat.

“A man, running along the street, stumbles and falls; the passers-by burst out laughing. They would not laugh at him, I imagine, could they suppose that the whim had suddenly seized him to sit down on the ground. They laugh because his sitting down is involuntary.”

In three sessions between winter 1988 and spring 1989 philosopher Gilles Deleuze, sitting in his living room, faced up questions of a television crew. The principle was as simple as sophisticated. The topics he was confronted with followed the letters of the alphabet – one letter, one concept, from ‚A as in Animal’ to ‚Z as in Zigzag’. To avoid zig-zagging in his discourse, Deleuze received the list of topics beforehand and thus worked assiduously on the answers he then extemporized on during the recordings. A project by Peter Stamer, Jörg Laue, and Alain Franco at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York

A magical mystery tour through Vienna. On November 22, 2013, the 50th anniversary of JFK assassination, we will drive in a chauffeured limousine around the streets of Vienna to commemorate the death of John F. Kennedy. We follow the timeline of Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas (which took place at 12.30) seven hours ahead, Vienna time. We will take the same route Kennedy took when he visited Vienna in June, 1961.